The Gleim Building: Mary Gleim's Front Street Empire
Near Missoula, Montana
The brick building at two sixty-five West Front Street in Missoula looks respectable enough today, with its arched Romanesque windows and rusticated granite sills. But it was built in eighteen ninety-three by Mary Gleim, who ran at least eight houses of prostitution in Missoula during the railroad boom years. West Front Street was the center of the city's red-light district, where honky-tonks and hurdy-gurdy houses had multiplied since construction crews arrived in the eighteen eighties.
Gleim's operation was entirely legal under city ordinance. She became one of the most notorious figures in territorial Montana, known for public outbursts and a sharp willingness to defend her business interests in court. She stopped running her business there in nineteen oh three but kept the building.
It later became a billiard parlor and has been in commercial use ever since. In nineteen ninety it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a rare intact example of frontier vernacular Romanesque.
